This invention relates to a pumping light generator and fiber Raman amplifier, and more specifically to an apparatus to generate a pumping light for optical amplification and a fiber Raman amplifier to use the pumping light generator.
Recently, fiber Raman amplifiers have received much attention as important optical amplification technology to solve a lack of amplification bands in future ultra large capacity optical transmission systems because it is capable of using any wavelength band as an amplification band by choosing an appropriate pumping light wavelength.
In the fiber Raman amplification, in principle, gain becomes the maximum when the state of polarization of the pumping light agrees with that of the signal light and the gain becomes zero when the state of polarization of the pumping light is orthogonal to that of the signal light. Therefore, in order to obtain a constant gain regardless of the state of polarization of the signal light, it is necessary to depolarize the pumping light.
To depolarize the pumping light, such a configuration as shown in FIG. 4 is well known (U.S. Pat. No. 4,805,977). Two laser diodes (pumping light sources) 10 and 12 output pumping lights of constant polarization, having no or small interrelation each other. A polarizing beam splitter 14 combines the output lights from the laser diodes 10 and 12 at almost equal optical power and in orthogonal state of polarization.
In addition, a method to depolarize the light with a birefringence medium or Lyot depolarizer is also widely known (See U.S. Pat. No. 4,572,608, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 57-190922, William K burns, xe2x80x9cDegree of Polarization in the Lyot Depolarizerxe2x80x9d, Journal of Lightwave Technology, Vol. LT-1, No. 3, pp. 475-479, Sept. 1983, and Kiyofumi Mochizukim, xe2x80x9cDegree of polarization in jointed fibers: the Lyot depolarizerxe2x80x9d, Applied Optics, Vol. 23, No. 19, pp. 3284-3288, Oct. 1, 1984).
Furthermore, the use of wavelength-division-multiplexed depolarized pump light has been proposed for depolarized pump light source with some source redundancy (Y. Emori, S. Matsushita, and S. Namiki, xe2x80x9cCost-effective depolarized diode pump unit designed for C-band flat-gain Raman amplifiers to control EDFA gain profilexe2x80x9d, Technical Digest, OFC2000, paper FF4, 2000). FIG. 5 shows a schematic block diagram of such a pumping light generator.
In FIG. 5, a laser diode (a pumping light source) 20a outputs a completely polarized light (or a highly polarized light) having a wavelength of 1428 nm, and a laser diode (a pumping light source) 20b outputs a completely polarized light (or a highly polarized light) having a wavelength of 1455 nm. The lights output from the laser diodes 20a and 20b are depolarized by passing through high birefringent optical fibers (or polarization holding fibers) 22a and 22b respectively and combined by a combiner 24. The light output from the combiner 24 contains the lights of the wavelengths 1428 nm and 1455 nm and are being depolarized or weakly-polarized.
In the conventional configuration shown in FIG. 4, the depolarized pumping light sources of high-output are realized because it is possible to combine two pumping lights of the same wavelength band at low-loss. However, if one of the pumping light sources has failure, the output light becomes a completely polarized light causing a fiber Raman amplifier to have severe polarization dependency.
In the conventional configuration shown in FIG. 5, since a pumping light of each wavelength is separately depolarized, the degree of polarization of the light output from the combiner 24 will never changes even if any one of pumping light sources has failure. However, in this configuration, since polarization combination to combine pumping lights at low-loss cannot be used, it is difficult to increase pumping light power in the same wavelength band. In addition, if any one of the pumping light sources of the respective wavelength has failure, gain wavelength characteristics (gain shape) of the fiber Raman amplifier are severely changed since this particular pumping wavelength component is absent.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a pumping light generator which solves the above-described problems.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a pumping light generator in which output power is easily increased.
A further object of the present invention is to provide a pumping light generator which can be realized with fewer elements and outputs a pumping light of high intensity in a depolarized or weakly-polarized state.
Still a further object of the present invention is to provide a pumping light generator in which output light is kept in a depolarized or weakly-polarized state even if one of pumping light sources has failure.
A pumping light generator according to the invention is composed of two pumping light sources, a combiner to combine the pumping light outputs from the two pumping light sources in orthogonal state of polarization, and a degree-of-polarization reducer to reduce the degree of polarization of the light from the polarizing combiner.
With this configuration, a single degree-of-polarization reducer can reduce each degree of polarization of the two pumping lights combined in orthogonal state of polarization simultaneously. Accordingly, if one of the pumping light sources has a failure, the degree of polarization of the pumping light output from the generator does not increase and thus it is possible to maintain high reliability.
Also, the pumping light generator according to the invention is composed of a plurality of pumping light sources, a combiner to combine lights output from the plurality of pumping light sources, and a degree-of-polarization reducer to reduce the degree of polarization of the light output from the combiner.
This configuration makes it possible that a single degree-of-polarization reducer can reduce the degree of polarizations of the plurality of pumping lights collectively. Accordingly, a simple, compact, and economical pumping light generator can be realized.
Preferably, the degree-of-polarization reducer contains a depolarizing element to depolarize the light output from the combiner.
The degree-of-polarization reducer consists of, for example, a birefringent medium. The birefringent medium is disposed so that it outputs each input pumping light from each polarization axis of the birefringent medium at practically equal optical power to the others. The birefringent medium has polarization dispersion longer than a coherent length of the output light from each pumping light source. The birefringent medium contains for example rutile crystal or YVO4.
The degree-of-polarization reducer is composed of the first and the second birefringent mediums in which each polarization dispersion is longer than a coherence length of the output light from each pumping light source, one polarization dispersion differs more than twice as much as the other one, and the second birefringent medium is arranged behind the first birefringent medium so that the light passed through one polarization axis of the first birefringent medium is output from two polarization axes of the second birefringent medium at almost equivalent optical power. By using this configuration, it is also possible to utilize a polarization non-maintaining type combiner.
A fiber Raman amplifier according to the invention is composed of the above-mentioned pumping light generator, an optical fiber to transmit a signal light, and an optical coupler to couple an output light from the pumping light generator with the optical fiber.